Rather Infrequent Open Thread
Risen 2 just keeps looking better and better.
I mean, it already had pirates. And Piranha Bytes (the guys who did the first Gothic games) are developing it. And it’s the sequel to Risen, one of the more promising — if underappreciated — RPGs in recent years. That is a fair bit of awesome right there.
But what if…just…what if those pirates were also wizards?
Another week, another awesome Skyrim media release!
This time showcasing elves, lizard men, cat men, and orcses!
More Mass Effect 3 media, too!
New screenshots (mostly showcasing combat scenarios and enemies), and a visually stunning new trailer.
…I trust by now that everyone has seen this XKCD comic?
I still remember it!
Meet the online password generator it inspired!
Internet Explorer 9 leads the pack for malware blocking?
Apparently, yes.
I know…I was kind of surprised, too.
The Russian government has impounded the world’s first floating nuclear reactor.
I bet you didn’t even know that someone — a Russian corporation, now apparently bankrupt — was building a floating nuclear reactor.
I know I didn’t.
A long-awaited, much-needed update to the C++ programming language.
That’s one way to settle a legal dispute!
Notch, creator of Minecraft, has challenged Bethesda Softworks to a game of Quake 3 to settle their legal differences over Mojang’s upcoming new game, Scrolls:
“I challenge Bethesda to a game of Quake 3. Three of our best warriors against three of your best warriors,” Notch writes. “We select one level, your select the other, we randomize the order. 20 minute matches, highest total frag count per team across both levels wins.”
“If we win, you drop the lawsuit. If you win, we will change the name of Scrolls to something you’re fine with.”
“I am serious, by the way,” he adds.
In case you hadn’t heard, Bethesda is suing Mojang because, in their opinion, the name Scrolls infringes on Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls property.
Finally! World of Warcraft has lost a million subscribers this year.
The first signs that Blizzard’s MMORPG juggernaut is beginning to wane are finally — finally! — showing.
Private space travel firm given approval for ISS mission.
I don’t know whether Richard Garriott has any involvement with the SpaceX project, but I’m sure he’s pretty happy at the news regardless.
CryENGINE3 is now free…at least non-commercially.
The folks at Crytek have released the SDK for CryENGINE3 (the engine that powers Crysis 2), and it is free for non-commercial use (e.g. tinkering at home, use in schools, etc.). There is a licensing fee (which you need to contact them about) that comes into force if you want to release anything you make commercially.
Taking a page out of IBM’s book, Hewlett-Packard has decided to spin off its PC-building business unit so as to focus primarily on enterprise services and solutions. Which, I guess, means that they’ll continue cranking out servers and networking gear, but not laptops or consumer desktops. Oh, and they’ll presumably continue to build printers, since they’re mostly known for that.
Oh…yeah. They’re also shuttering all further development of webOS devices, and are currently attempting to decide the fate of Palm’s mobile OS.
Tonight’s post brought to you by not getting it:
n00b!
FYI something crazy’s going on with your site. Chrome gives me some ridiculous warning about how this site may contain malicious software. Also some audio ad about zombies started playing. And no, I’m not high (yet).
Yeah, I think I’ve been compromised; there was a known vulnerability in one of the scripts I used for image management in the site template, and I must not have patched it in time.
I’m just running a grep search looking for injected code; if I can find it by tomorrow, cool; failing that, WordPress isn’t that hard to reinstall. (Changing templates can be a bitch, though.)
Super Darthno. :/ I’d read some stuff on /. recently about WordPress in that vein. They need to get their shiite together, apparently.
In other news, I got camera zoom and snowflake wisps working properly. The camera zoom is awesome, because when you’re running around it doubles the scale at which the world is seen. I’ll put up a video with the scale locked at 1:2 so it doesn’t look so Ultima VI (claustrophobic).
CryEngine 3 looks fairly decent, at least from the very limited tinkering I did with it. Gonna go play with the Sandbox some more. Pity they haven’t got it set up so you can, you know, actually release and play your stuff yet.
Oh. And why is the site still up if it got compromised?
Because the issue is infrequent; sometimes there’s a bit of extra code in the page and sometimes there isn’t. It’s massively annoying to try and diagnose.
Addendum: And it’s not a WordPress issue per sé; it’s an issue with a third-party script that allowed this compromise to happen.
I should have it rooted out by this afternoon, one way or another.
I found some hex-encoded stuff in a JS file that really shouldn’t have been there, and have reverted the file to its natural state.
Hopefully, this has fixed things.
Y’all let me know if you keep getting Google warnings and/or anomalous site performance, okay?
So far so good. I’ll let you know if it happens again.
Although not on the same scale, I thought many large warships these days were fitted with nuclear reactors? Certainly modern attack submarines are, and they can be as large as surface ships. Not quite as crazy as it seems, especially with Arctic oil fields up for exploration as the ice melts.
Back to gaming, I’m not sure I’m so excited about the movement that gaming is going in. The reason WoW is losing customers is in part because of the trend for developments of MMOs, especially free-to-play ones and ones using social media.
The only multiplayer I care for is FPS stuff (TF2, Counterstrike, Firearms), single player I prefer RPGs, Strategy or Adventure games and I’m getting far better service from smaller publishers (like Paradox) and indie developers. For the bigger stuff (ME3, Skyrim), I’ll be waiting for cheap sales a year or two down the line. Risen 2 does look rather interesting though.
You’ve a point about shipboard nuclear power plants, Andy…though somehow, I get the sense that this Russian effort was on a larger scale, and intended to power quite a lot more than just the boat itself.
I enjoy some multiplayer, as long as its consensual. MMOs are annoying, mostly because as a casual gamer I will always be behind everyone and I hate “griefers”. Diablo III is looking bad to me, because I can’t choose to play solo with their “always online” version of DRM and their awful cash store. And I don’t want to be bugged about my friends getting new cows on Facebook. But if I co-op on a FPS, or hit up Gears of War, I love multiplayer; if they could do this in an RPG, I’d buy it.
Oh, I wanted to mention that I’m going to start a series of Developer posts on the Digital Lycaeum. The first two are up now:
http://lycaeum.ultimaaiera.com/2011/game-engines/
http://lycaeum.ultimaaiera.com/2011/world-type/
Let me know if you have any specific topics you’d like me to hit. I’ll be adding more as I can.
Go right ahead! That’s great content.
As neat as Risen 2 looks I gotta… it doesn’t feels much like Risen and more like a different universe altogether.
Not that I mind the piratey approach, but tha doesn’t really seem to fit with Risen’s setting.
This looks pretty cool:
http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/23/deus-ex-human-revolution-manages-to-depict-an-original-sci-fi-world/
Watching the trailer it looks like a mixture of Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed. Maybe not so original, but good nevertheless.
JE Sawyer from Obsidian has fascinating Q&A on his Formspring site.
http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer